POLICE SAY DETECTIVE, AFTER DRUG BUY, KILLED MAN TRYING TO ROB HIM

An undercover narcotics detective who minutes before had bought $30 worth
of heroin in a buy-and-bust operation in Brooklyn yesterday shot and killed
a man who tried to rob him, the police said.

The police said the man confronted the detective at 11:50 a.m. in front of
371 Troutman Street, in Bushwick, about half a block from where the
detective had just bought three $10 glassine envelopes of heroin.

The man, identified as Reynaldo Colon, 33, of Ridgewood, Queens, approached
the detective with a folding Leatherman, a metal-colored multipurpose tool,
and said, "Give me the decks," using street slang to refer to the small
glassine packages of heroin, a senior police official said.

The detective responded by firing four shots, a senior police official
said. At least three bullets hit the man in the chest and torso. He was
pronounced dead at the scene.

The police said they recovered the Leatherman tool and a knife from the
dead man's waistband.

In the first hours after the shooting, the police said Mr. Colon had
approached the detective and menaced him with a knife. But last night, they
said the Leatherman tool was partly open.

The senior police official said Mr. Colon had an arrest record that
included charges for selling drugs.

Mr. Colon's brother, Ricardo, said that Reynaldo Colon had recently lost
his job at a Long Island pet store, and that he had a wife and daughter,
who live in Puerto Rico.

The detective, who is 29 but whose name was withheld because of the nature
of his undercover work, has not been officially questioned. But the senior
police official said investigators believed that the detective mistook the
tool for a small semiautomatic pistol.

"We believe the officer thought it was a gun," the official said last
night. "The cop never thought he had a knife; he thought he had a gun."

Immediately after the shooting, two other men were seen fleeing the area, a
police spokesman, Thomas Antenen, said. The police said they believed they
were part of the group that had sold the detective drugs, which bore the
street brand name Power. They were still at large last night.

The police would not provide details on the detective's service record nor
say whether he had been involved in any past shootings.

Mr. Antenen said the detective was working his regular shift, and not in
Operation Condor, the frequently criticized $55 million program under which
officers are assigned to work overtime shifts on patrols and drug
operations. The detective is assigned to Brooklyn North Narcotics, and
joined the department in 1993, according to Sgt. James Foley, a police
spokesman.

Through Monday, 25 suspects have been shot by the police this year, a 26
percent decrease over the same period last year, when 34 were shot,
according to figures provided by the Police Department. Of the 25 suspects
shot this year, 10 died and 15 were wounded. Last year, 10 suspects were
killed and 24 wounded.

The police commissioner, Bernard B. Kerik, a former undercover narcotics
detective, went to the scene and met with the detective.

Mr. Antenen said that he was not familiar with the detective's statements
but that he had "absolutely" feared for his life at the moment of the shooting.

Factories and warehouses line the block where the shooting took place. It
is an area of gravelly parking lots and a few apartment buildings.

Many residents had praise yesterday for how police drug enforcement had
improved the neighborhood. Joseph Zinerco, the owner of Paramount
Tortellini, a pasta company on Troutman Street, said that in the last nine
years, he had seen it change from "pretty scary" to "pretty clean." He said
yesterday's shooting "shows that there's a bad element out there." He
added, "I give the cops a lot of credit for putting their lives on the line."

Still, others were critical. "Even if this guy was a crackhead or a
criminal, that doesn't give them the right to kill him," said one
neighborhood resident, Carlos Antonetti.